Why Does God Allow Suffering? Biblical Truth You Need Now

Most anyone with eyes can see that a tremendous amount of suffering happens in our world today. Why does God allow so much suffering?

As we examine this question, we must first acknowledge that saying, “God allows suffering…” is really just a polite way of saying it’s God’s fault that suffering happens. Implied in this question is that He is the cause of the bad stuff.

This is deception, plain and simple. But why?

An Apparent Conflict

Some claim that we have no agency whatsoever when it comes to our salvation. They claim that God has full responsibility and saves only those whom He wills. They say we have no choice in the matter at all.

If we truly had no part to play in our salvation, then that would mean God arbitrarily picks winners and losers by deciding who will go to heaven and who will spend eternity in hell. Plus, if God controls everything that happens in our world, including even who can be saved, then it means God is also responsible for the bad stuff that happens in our world.

There’s a huge problem with that view.

If God really was arbitrarily doing bad things to good people, then He would not be good. Yet the Bible clearly says over and over again that God is indeed good.

To unwind this conflicting conundrum, let’s examine what the Bible has to say about this. Doing so is the only way we can arrive at the truth and see whether or not God really is responsible for the suffering in our world by “allowing” it.

Defining Terms

Before we get to the scripture, we need to establish a definition. One of the challenges with some of these conversations is that people tend to define words differently. The danger there is that folks talk past one another because they mean different things even though they might be using some of the same words.

For example the word “allow” has multiple definitions. Here is how Dictionary.com defines it as of this writing:

Allow

Verb (used with object)

1. to give permission to or for; permit:
2. to let have; give as one’s share; grant as one’s right:
3. to permit by neglect, oversight, or the like:
4. to admit; acknowledge; concede:
5. to take into consideration, as by adding or subtracting; set apart:

When it comes to the idea that God allows suffering in our world, we’re talking about the first definition specifically. This is because the idea flows out of the larger idea that “God is in control” meaning He is actively manipulating everything that happens in our world for His own higher purposes.

The challenge for those who hold to this view is that the theology which claims “God is in control” makes Him ultimately responsible for the evil which happens in our world. This creates an obvious contradiction because the Bible clearly says God is good.

One way some theologians attempt to circumvent that obvious contradiction is to claim that, while God is still in control, He doesn’t actively cause the bad stuff in the world, He instead just allows it. it’s an artful dodge, attempting to absolve God from being directly responsible for the evil that happens, while still saying He is “in control” by being only indirectly responsible for the evil.

The question, though, is this. What does the Bible reveal to us?

Let’s start with God’s grace.

Grace Available to All

The Bible tells us that God’s grace is available to everyone.

For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men.

— Titus 2:11 (NKJV)

Because God has already made His saving grace available to everyone, we cannot say that God is responsible for bringing some to salvation and not others. God’s salvation-bringing grace has appeared to all and is therefore available to all.

This is because there is a second component required for one to receive from God. In addition to God’s grace, our faith must be applied. That faith brings us into agreement with what God promises regarding our salvation.

It’s true that our faith is also a gift from God. His grace supplied us with His word. And faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God (Romans 10:17). Even so, many hear the truth of God’s word and still refuse to come into agreement with it. Therefore the word of God produces no harvest in their lives when it’s planted in their hearts.

Jesus shared this lesson in the parable of the sower. (See Mark chapter 4.) The condition, or attitude, of our heart greatly impacts how much of God’s grace is released becomes effective in our lives.

Receiving God’s Grace in Vain

This is why the Apostle Paul gave us this exhortation in his letter to the church at Corinth:

We then, as workers together with Him also plead with you not to receive the grace of God in vain.

— 2 Corinthians 6:1 (NKJV)

Apparently it must be possible to receive the grace of God in vain. Otherwise, it makes no sense for Paul to exhort us not to do so. That being the case, then it’s not God who is withholding His grace from folks.

This is where our faith comes in.

Faith Required

You see faith is not an abstract concept. It is tangible because it moves us to do something, or take some kind of action. In fact, James tells us that unless we do take some sort of action, that faith is dead and not really faith at all.

In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

— James 2:17 (NIV)

We see this combination of God’s grace and our faith in His promise of salvation. First, the Bible explicitly states that both God’s grace and our faith are required for salvation.

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.

— Ephesians 2:8-9 (NKJV)

We’re not saved, “by grace alone,” as some would say. Instead, we are saved, “by grace through faith.”

As an aside, some theologians will say, “we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone.” Yet since both grace and faith are required for salvation, then the adjective “alone” becomes nonsensical because neither one alone does it. But I digress.

“By grace through faith” is how we are saved. But what does that look like in a practical sense?

Fortunately, the Bible shows us.

The How-to of Salvation

Let’s start with this promise:

For “whoever calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved.”

— Romans 10:13 (NKJV)

This is the grace-provision of God’s promise for salvation, which is available to everyone. Even so, salvation is not automatic. It requires something of us. Specifically we must call on the name of the Lord.

Just a few verses earlier in that same chapter, the Bible also explains exactly what “calling on the name of the Lord” entails,

That if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.

— Romans 10:9 (NKJV)

We must take some action in order to be saved by God’s grace, specifically,

1. saying out loud with our mouths that Jesus is Lord, and,
2. believing in our hearts that God raised Him from the dead.

It is our agreement with God’s grace-provision promise by speaking and believing that is the faith-action which takes possession of this promise and makes it effective in our lives. This is true of salvation. And the same combination of grace and faith working together as a requisite requirement is also true when it comes to receiving every one of the 7,000+ additional promises God makes to us in the Bible.

Provision for Every Need

God is not causing our suffering. Nor is He “allowing” it. He has already provided His grace-promises to meet our every need. The Bible reveals this truth too.

His divine power has given us everything required for life and godliness through the knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and goodness. By these He has given us very great and precious promises, so that through them you may share in the divine nature, escaping the corruption that is in the world because of evil desires.

— 2 Peter 1:3-4 (HCSB)

God has already given, past tense, everything we need for life and for godliness. This is His grace, and according to this passage, that part is already a done deal. The passage tells us it all comes through our knowledge of God, His character, and His ways. And we experience it through His promises, as we receive them by faith.

In truth, God’s grace reaches down to us with perfect provision for our every need. However, until our faith rises up to take possession of that which God’ promises provide, we have only received God’s grace in vain.

An Analogy

Here’s an analogy to help illustrate this truth.

Imagine you are a multibillionaire and you decide you loved me and want to make me a millionaire. Therefore you decide to give me a gift of ten million dollars. You write a check for the amount and give it to me.

When I’m holding the check, do I have ten million dollars yet? Nope. All I have is a piece of paper with a promise from you to pay that amount to me. There is something I need to yet do before I come into possession of the actual money. I need to go to the bank, endorse the check, and deposit it in my account in order to take possession of the actual money you promised to give me in the check.

Say I never do that. In this example, let’s say for whatever reason I just throw the check you gave me in my desk drawer without ever signing it and taking it to the bank. If I responded to your gift that way, would you be to blame for “allowing” my continued suffering?

Of course not!

You went out of your way with an incredibly gracious gift specifically to relieve my suffering. Yet, if I refused to release faith in your gift by endorsing and depositing the check you gave me, my suffering would continue.

In this case It’s easy to see how the cause of my continued financial suffering is on my end. Maybe I don’t know how checks work and believe you’re supposed to go to the store for me, purchase what I need, bring it back to me, and drop it in my lap. Maybe I don’t really believe the check is good, or that it really belongs to me.

Regardless of my specific reason for not taking possession of your gift, the issue is on my end, not on yours.

Likewise God is not to blame for “allowing” our suffering. Instead, it’s up to us whether or not we will “deposit the check” of God’s promises in our heart and come into agreement with those promises to receive them by faith.

All God and None of Us

God gets all the credit and all the glory because His grace supplied His word, and faith comes by hearing that word. So the starting place for our faith is God’s word, which He has already provided for us in the form of the Bible.

But to say it is all God and none of us is simply not true. That is still saying that God is arbitrarily picking who will go to heaven and who will spend eternity in hell. That is just another way of saying “God is control.” Jesus didn’t go to the cross so that God could have mindless robots who have no choice in what they do. 

Instead, Jesus made a way for God to adopt countless sons and daughters.

And because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying out, “Abba, Father!” Therefore you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ.

— Galatians 4:6-7 (NKJV)

He did so to give us the same exact inheritance Jesus has.

For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, “Abba, Father.” The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him, that we may also be glorified together.

— Romans 8:14-17 (NKJV)

Think about that. We are joint heirs with Jesus. We share in the same exact inheritance He has from the Father.

Even so, unless we come into agreement with God and believe what He says in the Bible, nothing changes in our lives. There are serious repercussions for not believing God’s promises and acting on them in faith.

The Bible calls that unbelief and tells us it is flat out evil:

Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God.

— Hebrews 3:12 (NKJV)

Saying it’s all God and none of us, and meaning that He is wholly responsible for whether or not we are blessed simply does not line up with scripture.

Limiting God

Did you know that you and I can actually limit how much God is able to work in our lives? That might sound crazy, but it’s very true. Look at this verse,

Yes, again and again they tempted God,
And limited the Holy One of Israel.

— Psalms 78:41 (NKJV)

That verse comes in the midst of a passage relating the unbelief of the ancient Israelites and listing many of the ways they failed to stay in agreement with what God told them through their own forgetfulness and whatnot.

That verse clearly states that God was limited in His ability to work on their behalf because of their unbelief, which led them to sin and rebellion.

We also see an example of this in the New Testament. We see in Matthew 13:58 that Jesus did not to any mighty works in His home town of Nazareth because of the unbelief of the people there.

Mark adds some additional insight to this situation.

But Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own country, among his own relatives, and in his own house.” Now He could do no mighty work there, except that He laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them. And He marveled because of their unbelief.

— Mark 6:4-6 (NKJV)

In that passage we see that it wasn’t just that Jesus chose not to do any big miracles in His hometown. He was actually unable to do big miracles there like He did in other places. And the reason Jesus was unable to preform miracles there was because of the unbelief of the people there.

Therefore we can see in both the Old and New Testaments that our unbelief limits God’s ability to work on our behalf.

Neglecting God’s Promises

This is another reason why God is not really allowing bad stuff to happen in our world. God’s already done His part. He provided His word as the source of our faith. And He gave us thousands of promises in that word so we have everything we need to address whatever situation we find ourselves in.

Yet far too often we’re like the example above. Only instead of throwing the check in the desk drawer, we leave the Bible full of the very promises we need to experience life and godliness on our bookshelf, mostly unread.

We would do far better to keep our heads in the book, find the promises which speak to whatever our current situation is, and meditate on those promises day and night. It’s like what God told Joshua,

This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success.

— Joshua 1:8 (NKJV)

Of course Joshua was under the Old Covenant. That meant he needed to keep the Law in order to be blessed. But we are under the New Covenant, which comes with better promises.

Now, in Christ, the only requirement for us to see our way made prosperous and have good success like God promised Joshua, is to believe God’s promises and receive them by faith. yet the process to get there is the same. As we meditate on God’s promises day and night, faith rises up in us and we begin to experience the very things He promises to us.

This is the way God makes for us to escape the corruption of this world and experience God’s divine nature first hand. The more we grow accustomed to doing this, the less needless suffering we will experience personally, and the more we will be able to help alleviate the suffering of others too.

A Most Powerful Promise

This ties into one of my favorite promises in all of scripture.

And God is able to make all grace abound toward you, that you, always having all sufficiency in all things, may have an abundance for every good work.

— 2 Corinthians 9:8 (NKJV)

If we only received that one promise alone after coming to faith in Jesus, it would be enough to overcome most any personal suffering we might encounter in our lives. In doing so we would experience the truth that God is not responsible for allowing our suffering.